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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Growing Up Wild (Review)

Do you worry about how self-indulgent your children are
becoming? No? Maybe it’s just me. I struggle to find ways to help my children
have a missionary's heart, to look outside themselves and see the whole world that
Jesus wants us to reach. To that end, I am constantly on the lookout for tools to help me teach them. I was so pleasantly surprised with the
videos and curriculum produced by The Wild Family called Growing Up Wild.

The Wild Family are missionaries in Papau,in the remote jungles of Indonesia. The Mom and Dad Wild were the narrators of the
videos and that immediately personalized them.
But then we got introduced to their four beautiful boys Morgan, Hudson, Kian and Asher, and we were
drawn in even more.

Growing Up Wild Volume
1 includes a DVD with three episodes of videos: 1. Home Sweet Hut, 2. Supply
Trip, 3. Sun & Water. Each episode is 15 minutes long. The
accompanying DVD is the learning guide for those three episodes.

These lesson guides provide some wonderful lesson plans and
suggested activities covering many different subjects!

We did the Venn diagram from
Home Sweet Hut, where we compared what is the same and different about our
homes and the hut in which the Wild Brothers live.

We talked about solar panels and how they worked and we searched the internet to see if we could actually afford to have solar panels on our house! (Sadly, we could not.)

We went online to Google Earth and tried to find the Wild's hut and see the boys playing in the jungle. (Okay, I know it was a long shot, but you know how detailed that Google Earth is!)

In Volume 4, we learned about the following: 1. Amazing
World Around Us, 2. Adventures in Culture, 3. Tribal Calling.

Abbey loved how the missionaries taught the
Wano tribal members to accept Jesus. She
loved the testimony of precious Wano man and how Jesus has changed his
life. She and I talked about how awesome
that would be to experience---to teach a tribe that couldn't read at all prior to the missionaries coming into their villages, to read the Bible!

On the accompanying DVD for Vol. 4, we printed out the
iceberg and filled out the chart, as suggested in the activities.

It was so good for Abbey to realize how much
goes into a successful missions program.
It is so much more than just the actual missionaries having that
one-on-one contact with the people to which they are called to preach; it is secretaries,
the churches back home, the pilots, and it's me and it's YOU. We are all the salt and light of the earth.

We also printed off the Culture Worksheet provided on the Activity Guide and compared our culture with the Wano culture. The fun thing about this was realizing how much alike we all are--especially in our need for Christ. It was four pages long, but here is what the front page looked like:

There are five volumesof DVDs in all, and Abbey is begging me to
order the three that we don't have; it is my plan to do so! She has fallen in love
with the boys and their dog and their cat and all their wonderful stories and adventures.

Abbey’s Favorite Part: Watching the boys get their septums/noses
pierced. “It was hilarious!” Haha! That, for the record, was not my favorite part, but I LOVE that the boys were not afraid to do it!

Mom's Favorite Part: Watching my child engrossed in a video that is so meaningful. I could tell she was listening to every second because she would repeat details of so many of the video's scenes to her dad at night.

My only complaint is that the videos are not long enough! Having worked in television for six years, I do know producing a video is expensive, so I totally get it, but selfishly, we wanted to see more of the Wild Brothers! For now, we are satisfied to keep up to date with them over on their blog: http://thewildbrothers.com/blog.

Order Yours Today: The videos/curriculum can be purchased individually by volume for $18.99, or purchased as a group of all five volumes for $80.99 (a 15% discount).

Best Ages: The website recommends these videos for ages 5 - 12, but I think almost all ages could glean fun and useful information from them, especially in learning about a missionary's heart.

Best Uses of DVDs: They would be wonderful in a youth group setting, a Sunday school setting, an Anthropology class, or just one-on-one, as Abbey and I experienced them.

These DVDs were one of the most unique curriculum products we have gotten to review all year, and we feel so honored to have been chosen!

See what other Schoolhouse Crew Review Members are saying about the Wild Brothers and Growing Up Wild by clicking the banner below!

Disclaimer: I received Growing Up Wild Volumes 1 and 4 in exchange for writing an honest review on my blog. No other compensation was given.